Elizabeth Holmes mania is at a fever pitch – and this legendary filmmaker wants to get in on it.
More than a decade before “You Can See Everything” hit theaters, Errol Morris produced a series of 2015 commercials with Elizabeth Holmes for Theranos, her ill-fated blood-testing start-up that imploded amid wire fraud and conspiracy charges. The mildly unsettling ads were filmed in tight close-up, highlighting Holmes’ wide-eyed stare while crafting her lore as a female disruptor in Silicon Valley.
In a new article published Oct. 27, Morris told Variety that he spent a considerable amount of time interviewing Holmes – the raw footage of which he would now like to release.
“I did all the advertising for Theranos, but I did it at a time when Elizabeth Holmes was on the front cover of Forbes and many other magazines,” Morris said. “She was riding high, and this was before everything collapsed. Did I have any reason to believe that she was a fraud? I did not. Did that change as time went on? It did. I had tried very hard, over a number of years, to do a documentary on Elizabeth Holmes, and it would have happened except that she was under indictment. There was massive litigation going on.”
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Elizabeth Holmes, left, and Alan Murray speak at the Fortune Global Forum in San Francisco in 2015.
At one point, Morris asked Holmes whether “I could film an interview with her,” he added. “This is at the height of her success, and I did film a two-hour interview with her, which is not very well-known if it is known at all. And I just watched that. I am sincerely interested in putting that out as an unedited film.”
Morris noted, “If anything, it gives you a comparison of Elizabeth before and Elizabeth after, which I think is interesting in and of itself.”
Small portions of the footage were used in Alex Gibney’s 2019 documentary “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley.” But otherwise, Morris says that only a few people who work for him have seen his Holmes interview, which he considered releasing years ago before Theranos ultimately shuttered in 2018.
“The company fell apart and she was prosecuted,” Morris says. “But now I feel pretty strongly that this is an interesting document. Not because I’m trying to prove something about Elizabeth Holmes, but it does provide some kind of evidence of what she was like when everything was going her way. … She was a true believer [in the company].”
Morris, 78, is an Oscar-winning documentarian best known for “The Thin Blue Line” and “The Fog of War.”
“You Can See Everything,” meanwhile, has become a social-media sensation and unlikely box-office hit, netting $45 million in less than two weeks. The film is co-directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, who spent a month interviewing the enigmatic Holmes before she went to prison in 2023.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Wait, is there another Elizabeth Holmes movie on the way?
